It has been a few years since I last spoke
to Kimber in depth & I forgot how full of energy & exhilarating
she is. People who think I have way to much going on with all my
projects can look to Kimber & see that I'm just at a normal level compared
to her. She runs her record store Stinkweeds,
her art gallery Modified Arts, &
the Phoenix local business coalition Arizona
Chain Reaction. I think this interview came off really well &
has kind of filled me with more energy than I have had in a long time.
Here it is....

QRD – What’s Arizona Chain Reaction?

Kimber – That is the non-profit coalition
that I started about three years ago. It’s basically a shop local
campaign, and we’re trying to get people to understand the cultural &
economic impact that shopping locally can have. Here in Phoenix,
all the people moved here from somewhere else & chain stores are sort
of feasting on that transient culture. The chain stores have actually
been able to pit these suburbs against each other & it’s bleeding the
area dry economically and culturally. The municipalities are putting
all our tax dollars towards subsidizing these huge sporting goods stores
& Radio Shacks or Targets or whatever. They think it’s going
to make shopping better, but they’re just crack-addicts for sales tax dollars
& they don’t realize they’re bleeding us dry. There’s no sustainability
in their planning. They’re pitting Stinkweeds against Best Buy. Local
restaurants are against Applebee’s & Red Lobster & everything everywhere.
Amazing local places are what give a city flavor. When people don’t
understand. I ask them, Who ever came back from Chicago saying, “Chicago
is a great city because they have a Lowe’s & an Applebee’s & a
Kohl’s at every corner,” & then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not
what makes Chicago a great city.”

QRD – Yeah, Phoenix has grown & changed
to a totally different town in the past ten to fifteen years.

Kimber – Yeah, & we’re struggling with
that. I think we are making some strides with this local coalition.
We have over 800 members now & I can sit down & have meetings with
the city council & speak with mayors & the beating of their chain
store drums has subsided a bit. I think they’re realizing it’s not
such a great business plan. We’re exporting our wealth at a high
rate & for what? To make it so no one wants to come here?
All we’ll have left is golf. So it’s a war. Everyday is a war.
I’m also still doing Stinkweeds & Modified Arts, so everyday is action
packed.

QRD – You recently opened a second Stinkweeds,
but then pulled yourself back to one store. What happened?

Kimber – Well, the new store’s going to
have its second anniversary at the end of September. There were really
a lot of factors in that decision. I found this building downtown that
I wanted to buy, but there were still nearly 2 years left on my lease in
Tempe. Rather than miss the opportunity, I decided to open a second store
until the lease ran out. It was never my intent to have two stores, it’s
just how it worked out.

QRD – But you’re just working at the one
shop?

Kimber – Yeah. I sold the Tempe store
to a couple that moved here from Salt Lake City & they’re calling it
Slow Train. I didn’t sell the name or the website or anything like
that.

QRD – Just the physical location?

Kimber – Right. They bought all the
inventory & fixtures & shrinkwrap machine. It was like a
store in a box pretty much.

QRD – So there is now essentially just
one Stinkweeds?

Kimber – Right. It made sense …it
all just added up & the time was right & I made the decision to
move forward. I needed more time to focus on the non-profit, and
I was working 7 days a week for the past 3 years.

Kimber – Modified is a performance space
& arts venue. Basically I started having local art & shows
at the store in Stinkweeds years & years & years ago, probably
back in 1993. By 1999 we were having shows four nights a week &
I had the art on the walls booked over a year in advance. So I found
this little building downtown & I brought together this group
of hardcore Stinkweeds customers who were all dancers, performers, actors,
& musicians & I said, “Hey, I can lead this thing & run
the business aspects & renovate this building. But I can’t do
this on my own. It has to be a community effort because it’s going
to have to be volunteer run.” I started with a group of forty so
I could end up with six volunteers & that’s what I got.

QRD – So you started out with forty people
saying they were committed & ended up with six willing to do the work?

Kimber – Yeah. That’s a pretty normal
rate I think. People are like, “This town sucks & we need to
make it better,” & then they go home & play video games.
That’s fine for them, whatever; at least I got six people. It’s still
volunteer run this many years later & that was in 1999 that we opened
Modified. We’re open six to seven nights a week & we have theater,
film night once a month with local filmmakers, gallery receptions twice
a month, & live music, both local & touring. Anybody who’s
touring that’s going to bring less than 150 people comes through Modified
pretty much.

QRD – You’ve brought a lot of good bands
into the Phoenix area over the years that would’ve other wise skipped the
town. Are there any you would’ve liked to bring, but you just didn’t
think the local scene would support?

Kimber – You know, that happens a lot.
I run into a little bit of a difficult spot because we don’t have a liquor
license. A lot of bands are used to being paid $500-$800 in other
cities & they come to Phoenix & can only be paid $300-$400, which
is still an exceptionally high ratio of the door money because we only
come away a lot of nights with $75 in order to pay the bands as much as
we can. We have volunteers running things but all we have to sell
is chips & soda. So we have to work extra hard & still we
sometimes miss good bands. Right now Tucson has several options with
alcohol. I just lost DoMakeSayThink because I offered them $100 less
& they went right to Tucson. That breaks my heart because I could
personally lose the $100 to bring them here, but I wasn’t given that choice.
A lot of times it’s pretty cutthroat & they’ll only want to stop in
Arizona one time. It’s a guessing game because I don’t know what
the guy in Tucson is going to bid. It gets a little rough.
But I’m pretty firm on not wanting a liquor license in Modified because
I’ve got thousands of dollars of art up on the walls every month.

QRD – Throwing up on it or whatever.

Kimber – Yeah, or an elbow through it.

QRD – You started the store about twenty
years ago & offered a bit of a guiding hand for what customers should
check out. Are there any bands from Phoenix you think wouldn’t have
happened without Stinkweeds?

Kimber – I really hesitate to take credit
for someone else’s hard work. I will say that we have always encouraged
& supported local bands like crazy. But how much of that is their
own hard work is hard to say. I like to give bands credit for what
they do. But some of the bands we’ve really gotten behind like Fatigo
& Necronauts recently. There’s a label here called Western Tread
that Jim Adkins from Jimmy Eats World started & another label called
Sunset Alliance & I’ve formed allegiances with them to handle all of
their distribution through mail order. Those kinds of things are
really helpful. I’m willing for a buck a disc to connect them to
our Americart shopping system so people can order the CDs with the same
ease as anything else on my website. Currently there’s a band on
the road called Stiletto Formal that is a Phoenix band & I can literally
tell what city they are in by the orders that come in. All of a sudden
I get a lot of orders from Las Vegas & then Denver. I believe
those kinds of things are helping bands on the business side of what they
do so they can just go & create & trust that I’m behind them doing
everything I can.

QRD – As the age gap between you &
a lot of your customers has increased, do you have more trouble relating
to them?

Kimber – At times absolutely, but let me
answer that two-fold. What I’ve realized is I need to approach things
somewhat differently. I’m so used to being the person out there handing
out flyers & stickers & being at shows & being the face of
the store. This is hilarious, I handed these flyers to these guys
one time & as I was walking away I heard one of them say to the other,
“Dude, some lady just handed me a flyer.” & I thought, “Okay,
time to change your business practices Kimber!” I’m like the one
CEO that’s ten years past retirement & doesn’t recognize that there’s
a competent staff that needs to take over some of the stuff. Also
my customer age has actually increased due to the electronic influx in
my industry. I used to have a lot of high school customers &
I no longer do. & that’s a pretty scary aspect. Most of
my customers are college through mid-thirties I would say. So it’s
not that far of a stretch. But when I do get the younger customers
in, there’s no doubt that they’re looking at me in shock that I can talk
to them about the bands that they like.

QRD – Do you have a lot of second-generation
customers of people coming in with their folks?

Kimber – I wouldn’t say a lot. Most
of my customers’ kids are still too young to be buying their own music.
We have some that are old enough, but mostly what I have is a big box of
crayons & playthings behind the counter so the parents can actually
look around. I have a little area where kids can draw me pictures
& they get put up on the wall. What happens sometimes is you
get the rebellious kid who can’t stand anything progressive. I have
a customer who was asking, “Where did I go wrong?” because he had to go
see Christina Aguilera with his twelve-year-old daughter. I think
it’s particularly hard in this country right now because the mass media
is smothering kids with a standard that is unachievable in terms of physical
beauty. It used to be ordinary looking people with extraordinary
things to say & now we’ve got extraordinary looking people with nothing
to say. It’s been a subtle morph that most people aren’t really thinking
of. I recently started teaching a workshop in high school called
Youth Culture & Mass Media where I address these issues. I start
off showing pictures of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison & Brian Wilson &
James Brown & Jimi Hendrix & Janis Joplin & all of these people
would have the door slammed in their face today because they don’t look
right. Then I take them through the whole punk rock thing with Joe
Strummer and Joey Ramone & I then show them a picture of N-Sync next
to Good Charlotte & ask, “What’s the difference?” & nobody says
anything. I say, “Exactly, these people & concepts were created
in some record executive’s office to get money out of your pocket &
into theirs.” What are these bands saying to you? I talk to the girls
about how unrealistic Brittany Spears is. Her face has been airbrushed;
guys, your girlfriend is not going to look like that. When I went
in I was afraid that they would just not respond, but they get really engaged.
The teachers love it because they get engaged in conversation. &
the geeky kid in the back who’s always drawing that probably listens to
Pink Floyd & Jimi Hendrix sits a little taller when I’m done &
so do the reject skater kids. It’s pretty interesting because I can
go through a classroom & say, “Name me one CD that you got recently
that you really like. It doesn’t have to be your favorite, just tell
me one that you like. & I can tell what’s going on in that kids head
& the teachers are fascinated by that. They wonder “How do you
do that?” It’s because it’s what I do for a living. If they
say Nora Jones I have a clue what they’re like. If they say some
skate punk band I kinda know what they’re like . The really super-geeks
are listening to music from another generation entirely. Then the
alpha-males are into the shittiest gangster-rap. The rich white kids
in ties listen to whatever crap you want to talk about, but primarily Eminem.
The dirtier the better is their personal trip. It’s all pretty interesting.
But to answer your question; in a class of fifty people, probably only
ten of them have even heard of Stinkweeds or Modified. Which is pretty
scary.

QRD – & these are kids in the same
zip code, not in another suburb or whatever.

Kimber – Absolutely. These are kids
whose concept of music is downloading it, buying it online, or buying it
at Best Buy.

QRD – Did you see emo coming? It
seemed like overnight alternative music was assasinated by emo in the press.
You can hardly find an alternative music magazine anymore.

Kimber – It’s possible I’ve been so entrenched
in my own wars that I haven’t really noticed what’s happened in the press
to tell you the truth. I’ve always relied on actually listening to
play copies & to what the distribution companies say to know what to
buy for the store. But I do now look at online resources just to
make sure I have a clue what people are talking about. InSound &
Pitchfork definitely affect sales much more than anything in the physical
press, which is fascinating.

QRD – In the early 1990’s when there was
the big indie label boom, why were you content to stay a store when so
many others tried their hand at being a label?

Kimber – For me it was really just a matter
of time. Whether I’m playing in bands or going back to school or
running two separate businesses, or starting a non-profit, there’s just
not enough time in the day. & there’s never really been anybody
that I felt I could really partner up with. Right now I’m contemplating
starting another new company because I’m an idiot. It has a lot to
do with live music & trying to get people to go out to see more live
music, but I’m having a hard time feeling confident that anybody else that
I join with is going to come to the project with the amount of energy that
I always bring to whatever I’m doing.

QRD – Yeah, you need to get forty people
to find one.

Kimber – Yeah. I don’t know what
it is. I just do what I say I’m going to do & it’s getting harder
& harder to find people who do that.

QRD – Do most of the local customers know
that you were in Half String?

Kimber – No. I don’t really talk
about that. I’m actually in a new band now & people are surprised
to find out.

QRD – Playing drums?

Kimber – Yeah. The band is called
Letdownright. It’s two of the guys who were in an old Alias Records
band called Trunk Federation & we’re having a blast with it.
It’s a good place to be because nobody is trying to be a rockstar.
We’re writing new material & having a blast while we’re at it.
We just played a couple shows & we’ll be opening up for Silversun Pickups
in October. But I don’t really talk about it that much in the store.

QRD – Will there ever be a Half String
reunion? I mean the Pixies got back together....

Kimber – Matt & Brandon & I are
still close & I can see the three of us doing something. But
Dave is far far away. He has kids & I believe he’s in Wisconsin,
and he’s fallen out of touch with all of us. Matt’s in San Francisco,
Brandon’s in LA, & we all talk fairly regularly. Actually Brandon
hasn’t been playing too much, but Matt & I are still playing.

QRD – Do you think people wanting music
as data with no associated physical object (e.g. MP3s) is a fad or a permanent
market shift?

Kimber – I don’t see how you put the genie
back in the bottle. I don’t see how we can ever re-invent what music
is to you & I to the younger generation. Because it isn’t just
music, it’s everything in their lives. They’re impatient & everything’s
being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator & it’s all about
immediate gratification. Even when you think about food, you’ve really
got to cherish the best restaurants. Because what people are eating
is not the best food, but who has the best picture of the food. It’s
all being reduced to more of a visual connotation than any other sensory
input. It’s more important what people look like than what they’re
playing or saying. It’s an across the board shift in American culture
& this is just one of the fallouts. But I’m an old diehard for
this stuff. There’s that band Elefant who had a problem with their
newest CD. The problem was they got the gig opening for Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club & the label couldn’t get the merchandise to the stores
fast enough. But, they’d already sent out advance promos, so I don’t
see why they couldn’t get it together, but they said they couldn’t.
So what they wanted me & all the indie retailers to do was, since it
was already available online, was put out a jewel case in the store with
no disc in it; but only instructions on the inside for how to go home &
download it. So I whole-heartedly refused & wrote letters across
the industry stating, “How dare you imply that I would do this to my customers
& how dare you undermine everything that I stand for. I’m out
here trying to keep this industry together & you think for $13.99 I’m
going to sell instructions on how to download something?” The sad
part is that I’m in a coalition of indie stores & I only got about
50% of us to reject it. The others were like, “We’ll do it just to
prove it’s not going to work.” But to me, ethically, I had to take
a stand because it’s a copycat industry & if these guys think they
can actually not manufacture the disc anymore & still sell them, they’ll
do it in a second. It was a little dis-heartening that the stores
wouldn’t join hands. Anyway, someone at Hollywood got fired over
it & it was a big huge mess. I’ll hang on to the CD packaging
& the lyrics & if I can’t do it this way, I won’t do it at all.

QRD – What will digital downloads kill
first - chain record shops, indie record shops, major labels, or indie
labels?

Kimber – Definitely chains & majors.
Tower’s on the brink of bankruptcy again. Mainstream listeners are
not music fanatics. That’s the big difference. Music fanatics
want to support the bands; they want to support the labels; they want to
support the indie store. They get the big picture by & large.
Mainstream listeners want that song they heard on the radio & they
want it now & three months later they can’t tell you who wrote it or
who sang it because they weren’t really that engaged in the first place.
So that’s going to come out of the chains first. Also I think chains
are much more expensive for the most part except for Best Buy. Like
at Tower Records, it’s getting harder & harder to justify pricing anything
over $13-$14 & they’re doing it all the time & wondering where
everybody went. But Best Buy will never be able to compete with indie
stores as far as breaking new artists. For catalog sales & mainstream
artists they’ll always be able to hock stuff & so will Wal-Mart.

QRD – When you go to other indie shops
(be they record, book, clothing, or whatever), what’s the most common mistake
you see them making?

Kimber – Bad customer service. It’s
a thing I kind of talk about constantly in Arizona Chain Reaction, the
non profit I’m working on. We could often use to learn from the chains.
When you walk into an Applebee’s you’re instantly greeted, you’re instantly
seated, everybody’s friendly, your cup’s always filled, your food is served
& it’s the same as the food you got last time. People are appreciative
of those things. Personally, I don’t care if my meal is different
because of who’s in the kitchen. But what I do care about is if people
have good eye contact & if I have an issue I feel it will be taken
care of. A lot of times you go into places & there’s just some
dude behind the counter who really doesn’t give a damn. Then you
talk to the owner & he says, “Oh, he just covers me for a few hours
during the day….” Look, when I go into your store & it’s my first
time in your store & you got this kid behind the counter who doesn’t
even want to be there, then I don’t walk away going, “Oh, I bet the owner
is really nice, but that kid wasn’t very nice.” I think, “Look, those
guys are jerks.” That person is speaking for your store 100% when
you’re not there. You better make sure your staff is up to par.

QRD – What do you think indie record labels
could do to best help both themselves & indie stores?

Kimber – What I would ask indie labels
to do they would never be able to do. What I would ask them to do
is to stop the advertising buy-ins with Best Buy, that would be my very
first thing. Did you follow that thing that happened last year?

QRD – With Best Buy having Merge releases
below cost & all that?

Kimber – Yeah. That sort of program
hurts indie stores more than anything else & if they continue to do
that, there is going to be resentment. & they don’t want there
to be resentment because what’s going to happen is all that will be left
standing is Best Buy, Wal-Mart, & all the little indie stores.
& the only way they’re ever going to break new artists is through the
indie stores. So to me it seems the train is going off the cliff
& they’ve got to make a decision which side they’re on. I think
the more they support Best Buy & Wal-Mart, the more bitterness &
lack of enthusiasm there will be on our part.

QRD – When you see a record store selling
skate shoes or fancy soda or bongs or novelty toys to make ends meet, do
you feel it really is necessary or they just aren’t doing their job properly?

Kimber – There’s all different ways to
run an independent store. I personally decided to stay true to selling
music, but there are a lot of stores that do a hell of a lot more business,
so I can see both sides. I went into Twist & Shout in Denver
& they’ve got rows & rows of things like skull-shaped salt &
pepper shakers & shower curtains & who knows what. So they
gross who knows how many times as much money as I do & that allows
them to support indie bands better than I can. If they have an in-store,
they might sell 70-80 copies of a band’s CD because it’s such a massive
store because they make so much money selling salt & pepper shakers.
So it goes both ways. I’ve remained true, but when a band comes to
town & does an in-store I do good to sell 10 copies of their CD because
I’m still so relatively unknown because I still don’t carry Beatles or
Eminem or anything else & I’m a hard ass about it. It’s not the
best business model, but it is the best business model for who I am &
looking in the mirror everyday. But I can see how you can do it &
still have a damn good store. I’ve never been to Shake It in Cincinatti,
but I have a hell of a lot of respect for the owner Darren & I know
he sells a lot of stuff.

QRD – What is the job of the independent
record store & how is it different from Tower & Target?

Kimber – To help brand new bands find their
audience, number one. Number two, help customers discover music for
real. Number three, & this is a really important one, to provide community.
There’s a community around a record store the way there is around a bookstore
that you’ll never find in one of those other stores.

QRD – What’s your favorite music geek movie?
High
Fidelity?

Kimber – I don’t really have one.
There were aspects of High Fidelity that I thought were funny, but
for the most part I’ve never really liked any of them. I still have
my aspirations for doing something with my collection of short stories
that I’ve been accumulating.

QRD – What makes you feel like you had
a good day at the store?

Kimber – Being able to juggle a 16-year-old
kid, a 38-year-old mom, & a 45-year-old business man who all stopped
by & felt like they had a good experience.